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With the extermination of al-Qaeda's number one terrorist in Iraq, there is reason for great celebration, although one would never know it listening to liberals in Congress, the mainstream media and the kook fringe of the left-wing blogosphere.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had been in Iraq for at least a year before the American-led invasion that freed the country from the grip of Saddam Hussein. A cunning sociopath committing murder under the guise of radical Islam, Zarqawi had successfully eluded capture for more than three years, all the while raining fear and bloodshed upon the Iraqi people and their American liberators in an attempt to foment civil war.

One of the most heinous monsters ever to pick up a weapon against the innocent, Zarqawi personally beheaded American contractor Nick Berg and broadcast the atrocity on the Internet. His brutality rivaled that of Saddam himself, and news of his death was celebrated in his home country of Jordan, where the king has denied him burial rites.

With the elimination of Zarqawi and his "spiritual advisor," Sheik Abdel Rashid Rahman, who also died when two 500-pound American bombs were dropped on their reinforced safe house, the Left is downplaying the incident while simultaneously declaring it to be the watershed event that should allow us to begin an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Even for liberals, this is strange logic. But because they have already declared defeat for America, logic doesn't matter. They have concluded that we have already lost the war, just as those of the same mindset did with Vietnam. Therefore, their thinking goes, if we have already lost the war, there is no reason to stay for five more minutes. Ergo, the elimination of Zarqawi will suffice as an excuse to withdraw from what they consider to be a quagmire.

Now comes the hue and cry from these same voices about "torture" and "brutality" on the part of the troops who arrived on the scene and found Zarqawi alive. We hear veiled accusations about our soldiers beating or otherwise mistreating the poor, defenseless terrorist as he lay on the stretcher, his life ebbing away. Let me ask you this: Does anyone outside the ivory towers of the fourth estate, the phony world of tinsel town or the halls of academia give a rip what our troops did to this cockroach after we dropped 1,000 pounds of ordinance on his head?

There was a time in our history when we understood that there were evil men in the world who must be vanquished. Hitler was such a man. Can you imagine the press corps or members of the opposition party in Congress questioning the methods whereby allied forces eliminated the leader of the Third Reich? Would there have been anything but jubilation? Of course not! Then what are we to think of those who are unable or unwilling to see the nature of evil in our time? Thank God for those who still understand that it must be confronted and wiped from the face of the earth.

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